Shallow trench isolation (STI) structure is an isolation technology in an Integrated circuit (IC) device. One of the purposes of STI is to prevent carriers, such as electrons or electron-holes, from drifting between two adjacent device elements through a semiconductor substrate to cause a current leakage.
Integrated circuit technologies are constantly being improved. Such improvements frequently involve scaling down device geometries to achieve lower fabrication costs, higher device integration density, higher speeds, and better performance. Along with the advantages realized from reducing geometry size, improvements are being made directly to the IC devices.
Due to device scaling, improvements to IC devices are continually being made to further improve STIs.